Food Lab: Chocolate Redux

Precisely two years ago, your intrepid Food Labbers bit off more than we could chew and attempted to make chocolate from beans at the same time as testing the differences between Dutch process and natural cocoa powder, methods of melting chocolate, tempering chocolate, and fixing seized chocolate.

We did not get to all of that.

But we all still had raw and roasted cacao beans, so we decided to make another run at bean to bar, still inspired by what Chef Spouse and I had seen in Cozumel in the winter of 2022.

In theory, the process is simple:

Roast beans

Hull beans

Grind beans

Combine with sugar (and, potentially, some combination of honey, vanilla, allspice, cinnamon, and/or achiote) 

Sounds easy, right?

Challenge one, which we'd discovered two years ago: hulling the beans takes some serious time.

No problem! Chef Spouse roasted and hulled in advance!

Challenge two: grinding the beans finely enough to be palatable.

When we watched the demo in Cozumel, the guy making the chocolate used a large rectangular molcajete, with a grinder that was more rolling pin than pestle, and it came out great.

We have a mortar and pestle style molcajete, plus a blender, a food processor, and an electric coffee grinder that's reserved for spices. So grinding the beans should be no problem, right?

Wrong.

The taste? Well, it was great - we were adding all those optional flavors to taste, so: YUM. But no matter what we tried - and the electric coffee grinder can easily take coffee beans to an espresso grind - we could not get the grind fine enough for the finished product to be anything other than unpleasantly grainy. 

We even tried heating some of the ground beans with a little cream - on the left up there - and all that happened was the fat separated.

BOO!

Turns out, if you REALLY want to make bean to bar chocolate, you need a melanger, a device that's designed to run for 24-48 hours STRAIGHT without burning out the motor, to get the grind fine enough.

Well, damn.

What to do with all those roasted and ground cacao beans? 

Chef Spouse observed: They look kinda like coffee. What if we treated them as such?

All by themselves, the brew is too thin. But, as we've discovered in the mornings since, adding 1-2 TBSP to your usual coffee beans makes for a DELICIOUS morning cuppa.

Fortunately, we'd planned a meal of tacos al pastor, frijoles negros, and corn and black bean salad in advance, because the bean to bar experiment was a FIAL.

Mad Kitchen Scientist also brought the ingredients to make homemade Irish cream, and here's where we landed there:

1 tsp cocoa powder

1/2 tsp espresso powder

1/2 c heavy cream 

14 oz can sweetened condensed milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 c Irish whiskey (he chose Jameson)

Blend all & refrigerate 

For dessert? Chocolate flan, natch.

Food Lab: Chocolate

Seeing as our last Food Lab was last summer, have your intrepid Food Labbers been subsisting on nothing but carry out and boxed mac & cheese since then?

Fear not! 

We've been cooking and eating together QUITE well and QUITE frequently, just not Labbing much, partially because we've all been suffering from a bit of topic-block. Given everything we've taken on since we first launched this crazy project in 2010, what remains?

I'll tell you what remains: CHOCOLATE

Mad Kitchen Scientist was the one who started the whole thing off, observing that "chocolate is something that WE do not know, and knowing about tempering and all such things is becoming something fashionable among foodies." 

How did it take us more than ten years to take on chocolate? How did we not notice we hadn't taken on chocolate? That I do not know, and yet, here we are.

Will it surprise you to learn that our initial plan turned out to be a bit ambitious?

We did manage to head one excess off at the pass: we decided NOT to revisit mole lab in making dinner. Chef Spouse gently observed that that might be a bridge too far for a Sunday afternoon. 

Our initial list included:

• Taste test various % cacao 
• Make chocolate from cacao beans 
• Differences between Dutch process & natural process cocoa powder
• Different methods of melting chocolate
• Fixing seized chocolate
• Tempering chocolate

Chef Spouse regularly makes me homemade truffles, and we were currently out, so we had our base already chosen for the tempered chocolate (my other idea was coconut and/or peanut butter Easter eggs, but I was overruled). Because the ganache base needs time to cool before it can be formed into truffles and dipped, Chef Spouse prepared it before everyone arrived. He favors alcohol as a flavoring agent, so we went with my two favorites: absinthe and añjeo tequila. (He used to use sweet liqueurs like Amaretto and Chambord, but we both realized they tend to be cloying.) 

We had seen chocolate made by hand from cacao beans on a recent trip to Mexico, so Chef Spouse was eager to give it a shot and ordered 1 kg of organic cacao beans. They arrived fermented - the first processing step - but not roasted, so after tasting the pre-roasted beans (pleasantly fruity and bitter), we went on to roast about 10 oz. immediately following the simple 5 minutes at 400 - 5 minutes at 350 - 5 minutes at 325 - then 300 until done (~10 minutes) recommended pattern. 

(I should point out that eating the fermented but not roasted beans can be a little dangerous - similar to eating raw eggs or meat, both of which you already know we do - so roasting not only allows you to remove the beans' husks, it also kills any pathogens on the beans. Anyway, we each tried a bean, we didn't chow down on handfuls. But do so at your own risk.)

Sooooo....getting the inner beans out of the husks turned out to be a bit of a production and put the whammy on most of the rest of our plans, including the plans to turn those beans into chocolate. We now each have a container of nibs waiting to be chocolatized in the hopefully near future. Fortunately, if you store them carefully, they have a pretty substantial shelf-life of up to two years. 

However, while everyone else was fooling around with the hot beans, I decided to get onto the cocoa powder tests. I had done a bit of advance research at Serious Eats and Sally's Baking Addiction, where I learned that in addition to slight taste differences (Dutch process, to my taste buds, is more chocolatey, while natural is "brighter"), it comes down to acidity. Dutch process produces a neutral pH of 7, while natural process is more acidic, coming in at a pH of 6 or even 5. 

Why does that matter?

Well, what are you making? If it's a baked good that depends on baking soda for its leavening, it may matter quite a bit, as alkaline baking soda requires an acid environment to be activated. 

So I pulled out my mom's simple chocolate eggless cake recipe, which I remembered relying on baking soda, and got to work. I measured out all the dry ingredients into two bowls, one with natural and one with Dutch process cocoa powder.

Then I turned to the wet ingredients: canola oil, water, vanilla....damn it. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the recipe also includes a small amount of vinegar. FOR ACIDITY. 

So much for that test. Both layers rose just fine. 

So I said screw it, made some cherry icing, and turned them into a cake. 

Meanwhile, the hullers were still at work.

Eventually, they finished and were able to return to the ganache and form the truffle centers.

At this point we broke for dinner: cacao-crusted hangar steaks and roasted cauliflower and steamed green beans with Mad Kitchen Scientist's take on a Cacao Picada Sauce

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Cacao Picada Sauce (loosely adapted from Saveur)

3/4 c olive oil
8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1/2 c almonds
1 c fresh parsley
~3 T of dark chocolate (baking chocolate at least 60% cacao)
~2 T sherry
salt, freshly ground white & black pepper

Toast almonds. Simmer garlic in olive oil until just getting some golden color.

Put almonds, chocolate, parsley in food processor or blender. Process in chunky salsa. Add sherry and garlic & oil. Blend to desired consistency. Season with salt & peppers and adjust other flavors as desired.

After eating, it was on to the idea that started this whole thing: tempering chocolate and, more specifically, covering the truffles in the tempered chocolate.

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After diner, it was back to the truffles. 

(Due to a promise to an old friend, I am forbidden from taking part in the making of truffles, so I was merely an observer at this point.) 

So I asked Chef Spouse what he learned about working with tempered chocolate, and he replied that it gets hotter than you think it will faster than you think it will, it keeps rising in temperature longer than you think it will, it's harder to get it to working temperature than you would think it would be, it's harder to hold it at optimum working temperature that you would think it would be....and having three pairs of hands to dip the truffles was a MAJOR improvement over his usual solo process.

I'm sure that's all true, but the finished product is so delicious, who cares about your troubles, Chef Spouse? ;) 

Drinks to accompany? A take on a Oaxacan old fashioned (reposado tequila, mezcal, agave nectar) that we tested with both mole and chocolate bitters, universally agreeing that the chocolate bitters win. (I think we should rename it a Mayan old fashioned.) 

We never got to playing around with seized chocolate or the chocolate tasting or, of course, making chocolate by hand. As I said, overly ambitious. 

Easy Chocolate Truffles

Yesterday, we learned how to make truffles.

Don't get me wrong - Chef Spouse already knows how to make truffles.

He makes amazingly delicious truffles from a super-secret recipe that was given to him in STRICT confidence and with several conditions on the serving thereof for purposes of, and I quote: "sexual blackmail."

They rock.

They're also a bitch to make - time consuming, many ingredients, and quite finicky about precise temperatures and handling.

We were dining with our friend Chef Terry recently. He brought truffles for dessert, and he and Chef Spouse got chatting about making them. Turns out, Chef Terry knows an easier way. So we gathered yesterday for him to show us.

Chef Terry's truffles use precisely three ingredients:

220 g. of heavy cream
283 g. of 60% cacao Ghiradelli chocolate chips (plus more to enrobe your truffles)
About 1 Tbsp. of your flavoring agent (which in our case was amaretto)

Heat the heavy cream on the stove in a heavy bottomed sauce pan until it just starts to bubble, like so:

Remove it from the heat, pour your 283 g. of chocolate chips into a glass bowl, then pour over just enough of the warm cream to cover, thusly:

Let it sit for about 30 seconds to start the melting process, then whisk gently in one direction only and drizzle in the rest of the cream SLOWLY. All this "gently" and "slowly" business is to keep you from splattering melted chocolate and cream all over yourself and your kitchen. Unless, you know, that's your thing.

Then add your flavoring agent and whisk in. It should look like this when you're done:

"Hey!" you might say. "That looks just like ganache!" That's because it is. And at this point, if you happen to have a cake standing by and have changed you mind about making truffles, you can pour your ganache over your cake and be on your merry way.

Let's assume, though, that you want to continue your truffle adventure (or you have no un-iced cake handy). The next step is to cover your ganache tightly with plastic wrap and let it rest. Get the plastic wrap right down on the chocolate - you're trying to create an air-tight seal. Now comes the hard part: let the ganache rest at room temperature for at least 6 hours, preferably more like 24. The longer you wait, the easier the mixture will be to handle.

To form your truffles, you have two options: if you let the ganache rest more like 6 hours, you'll pipe them. If you let the ganache rest more like 24 hours, you'll scoop them.

Either way, you then want to let them set up for a few hours before enrobing them. You can shorten that by popping them in the fridge, but even then, they need at least an hour.

To enrobe, pour more of your 60% cacao chips into a glass bowl and microwave them for about 30 seconds. Stir gently, then hit them again for another 20 seconds or so. Stir gently, and test the temperature with an actual candy thermometer. You're aiming for about 101 degrees. You're tempering your chocolate (which Serious Eats explains really well, if you're curious). Short version: it's all about crystals. Once the chocolate is at the right temperature to do the right things to the crystalline structure of the cocoa butter in the chocolate, you'll be able to cover your truffles with a coating that will turn shiny and make them relatively shelf-stable.

The way you do it is pretty simple, but also kind of messy. You need chocolate on your hands, and then you drop the truffle center into the bowl, and gently toss it between your chocolate-covered hands to fully coat it. Wear gloves.

Then simply deposit them on your parchment-paper lined cookie sheet until the chocolate sets up and enjoy!

Oh - and all that "extra" chocolate that you drip onto the parchment paper in the process of doing this? Basis for your next batch of truffle centers.

Pretty Damn Good Chocolate Chip Cookies

About a month ago, my pops sent me a link to a recipe he found online promising the "perfect"

chocolate chip cookies.

And I made them, and they were good, don't get me wrong.

But this is Food Lab, goddamnit. "They were good" doesn't cut it. Drop and give me 20, soldier!

I thought the other cookies were too sweet. I liked going heavier on the brown sugar than the white for a nice moist cookie with a deeper flavor, but 1 1/2 c.  sugar total is too much, particularly with 12 oz. of semisweet chips AND 8 oz. bittersweet.

I also thought they were too large. In the "traditional" Toll House recipe, you're putting down about 1/4-1/2 oz. per cookie. "Perfect" tells you to make each cookie 2 oz. That's 1/4 c. batter. That's not a cookie - it's a dinner plate with chocolate chips in it.

I also followed the mixing directions to the letter, which was a mistake. I ended up with a bunch of unincorporated dry stuff at the bottom of the bowl. And kosher salt was a mistake, too - the grains are too big - and the recipe called for too little (also contributing to the "too sweet" problem).

So I decided to tweak the recipe.

1 c. unsalted butter at cool room temperature
2/3 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. white sugar
1 tsp. sea salt 
2 tsp. vanilla
2 large eggs
1 tsp. baking soda
2 c. flour
16 oz. (ish) of bittersweet chocolate chips (I didn't measure precisely - I had a full bag and a partial bag that was, I think, about 1/2 full, which would technically be 18 oz. of chips)
1 c. pecans, finely chopped (which you can replace with walnuts or skip entirely if you don't like nuts)

Preheat your oven to 375 F. 

Cream the butter, sugars, salt, and vanilla (you can do it by hand but it's a hell of a lot easier to do it in your stand mixer). The creamed mixture will not be as fluffy or light in color as normal because of the higher amount of brown sugar, but that's OK - don't worry!

Add the eggs and beat until they're fully incorporated, then add the baking soda.

With the mixer on low speed (so flour doesn't fly all over the place), add the flour 1/2 c. at a time, stopping to scrape up the bottom, scrape down the sides, and scrape out the paddle periodically. Mix until it's all fully incorporated.

Toss in your chips and nuts, and mix on low speed until fully incorporated. Make sure the arm of your mixer is locked, or all those chips and nuts will make it buck. Alternatively, you can take the batter off the mixer first and stir in the chips and nuts by hand.

Drop your cookie batter by rounded tablespoons onto your favorite cookie sheet. You're looking for about 1 oz. batter per cookie. It's up to you whether you grease or not, parchment paper or not, Silpat or not, or just go au naturel. I've tried it with the Silpat and bare and not noticed a significant difference.

Bake for about 9 minutes. The original recipe is correct - you need to pull them out when they're getting a little brown and crispy at the edges but are still underdone in the middle. Let them rest on the hot cookie sheet for about a minute to firm up, then remove them to racks to cool.

Tell me those aren't gorgeous!

Next time, I think I'm going to try forming them into balls and refrigerating them before baking, like I do with most of my other butter-based cookies. I think it will help them maintain their shape better in the oven.